


In The Shoebox Under My Bed

by RocketRabbits



Category: Maggot Boy
Genre: Descriptions of Dissociation, Dialogue Heavy, M/M, Post-Canon, They're getting happier, but boy does that kid have shit to work through, by like three years, chainey/parker brotp, descriptions of panic attacks, everyone loves him very much, iiiiits a parker trauma fic!, owens mentioned but not really by name, parker copes with things, parker jones deserves a more stable future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 08:16:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13096092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RocketRabbits/pseuds/RocketRabbits
Summary: That's where the memories stay(Parker Jones just has to get over this. He's got time to figure out how)





	In The Shoebox Under My Bed

Logically, he guesses, he always sort-of knew he’d be traumatized. The realization hit him the first night he spent at the Nightengale’s, curled up in Deacon’s bed, Bitty spooned into the curve of his back. It’s a numb sort of buzz, he guesses. Traumatized. Sure. He’s known trauma before, knew it when Davey died, knew it when he saw the bus make contact, knew it when he couldn’t close his eyes for months without seeing the pavement tear the flesh from his older brother’s bones in agonizing slow motion, his own mind providing details he hadn’t actually caught from his bedroom window. Yes, Parker Jones and trauma were old acquaintances that still sometimes caught lunch, and he was powerless to escape it.

He expected it to hit earlier, though.  Parker always thought he’d spend his junior and senior years taking the long way to school just because it was a different route, maybe walking past alleyways faster than he usually does, maybe triple checking that his windows were locked and still not being able to sleep near them. Parker expected something to hit him sooner, but all he ever felt was the same dull buzz that had rung in his ears in Deacon Nightengale’s bed. _This is going to hurt you forever._

It doesn’t kick in until he graduates high school, a feat he hadn’t quite thought he was capable of that his parents didn’t seem to have faith in either. They’d told him again and again that work was just as important as education, that in a world like this, anyone could forge a decent life, employers couldn’t be picky. Yet he walked across the gym almost tripping over his robe, trying to hold in a grin, his foundation so thick the cameras on the ceiling could probably pick it up, only the slightest bit hungover from the ‘party’ he and Micah had thrown themselves the night before. From the moment his name was called and he stumbled alone across the makeshift stage, he couldn’t help but naively think the worst was behind him, and maybe, just maybe, his ghosts wouldn’t know where to find him.

 

The city had seemed so small before. Maybe when you’re sixteen and anxious for change every hometown seems small. Parker wouldn’t know, being born and raised in Sovereign City, but he knew there were larger ones. Chicago, he’d heard, was gigantic. So gigantic that parts of it survived for years after the uprising, though nobody in the communication sector had heard from them in months. If Chicago was big, then New York could have been its own sovereign nation and, he thinks, maybe now it considers itself one. Hard to say, when nobody ever seems to have contact with them at all. Digital billboards scattered around the city have ranked lists of other stable locations and how active they are on coms, but they’re rarely ever updated. A few cities in North and South Dakota, now listed as one metropolitan area despite their relative distance, remain at the top of the list, shortly followed by Des Moines and other cities in former farming states. Passing them now Parker remembers a time he would have done anything to catch an outgoing cargo van and ride it all the way to one of those places, one that was new and fresh and felt nothing like home.  
  
Sometimes, passing those billboards, he thinks he maybe still could. Not because Sov City feels too small, but because now it feels too large.  
  
Sovereign City, Oregon, had a population of around thirteen million at the last sort-of census. It was a guesstimated number, to be sure, but it was the closest to hard fact that Parker had when he searched it, one hand clutching his too-fast heart through his t-shirt, the other frantic and shaking. Thirteen million people and still a whole section of the city is empty, apartment buildings never quite renovated after the uprising left to decay, entire business districts long since condensed and relocated, their storefronts and offices left to loom over frightened teenage boys who wandered too far from home. Thirteen million people, most of them still traumatized and agoraphobic, and the city still somehow manages now to feel too big, too all consuming. Too many terrors can hide in the dark.

He thought he’d face these fears as a teenager, thought maybe the world wouldn’t get worse as he got older, but it seems to. Panic attacks follow him out of his house in the mornings and any place with too much noise is only a place where he’s easier to catch and less likely to be reported missing, and the can of mace he keeps hooked to his belt loop does very little to assuage any fears of potential attackers. Everything just seems more dangerous when he remembers.  
  
At nineteen years old, the nightmares start. They’re simple at first, just flashes of stitched up faces that leave him gasping, but sometimes they’re accompanied with a weight on his chest and a foul smell he can’t put a name to wrapping its tendrils around his neck or, maybe, filling up his throat from the inside making it that much harder to breathe –

 - He wakes shaking, always, one hand clutched to his chest and the other scratching at his neck doing its best to get any trace of those awful filthy fingers from his skin, unable to quite shake the feeling of stubby, chipped nails digging into his windpipe. “Parker,” he whispers, voice softer than he means it to be, “Parker. You’re okay.” _You’re_ okay. Like whatever his voice is attached to isn’t the body he’s inhabiting. He flops back into his bed and stares at the ceiling above him. “This isn’t real,” he says out loud, and mere moments later he isn’t sure if he said it at all, “I’m not real.”  
  
Micah meets him for ice cream at eleven in the morning, at least an hour before he even considers waking up most days, and he only whines about it twice. There are other things to focus on, anyway.  
  
“PJ, that’s an awful color. You’re not supposed to be able to tell where the foundation stops and your skin starts. Here, let me show you.” He shoves his spoon back into his almost empty ice cream cup and pulls up his phone. Parker vaguely sees him pull up a couple of skin tone charts, and he yanks Parker’s hands toward him. Parker lets himself be yanked, lets Micah squint from his phone to Parker’s hand, and promises to read the several texts he hears buzzing on his phone, most likely his skintone as represented across at least three – another buzz – _four_ different brands, all promising flawless blended beauty.  He’d really only ever worn it to hide the bags under his eyes. Flawlessness. Sure. If he’s going to feel so shattered his skin might as well look good. Besides, listening to Micah like this is the most tangible he’s felt since that morning.  
  
_“Micah sounds like a very good friend.” His therapist, Dr. Markman, says it in that therapist way, like it’s a statement of fact and somehow also a question._  
  
_“Yeah. He’s always been there for me.”_

 _“And you feel safe with him.”_  
  
_“Well, yeah. Don’t get me wrong, he’s frustrating. He’s lazy and hates everyone and most things. But he’d still stop the world for me without me even asking, and I owe him a lot.” There’s quiet for a few beats while Markman scribbles something down, even though Parker can’t figure out what it is. He’s talked about Micah like this before. “He makes me feel real.”_  
  
_“Can you explain?”_

 _“Like,” Parker’s hands hover around his face and he pauses, hoping the right gesture or vague mouth sound might convey what happens to him sometimes. “Like I’m fake, y’know? And he isn’t. And when I’m near him, I get to be real, too.”_  
  
_“Why do you feel fake?”_  
  
_“Because none of this bothered me when it was happening. Or even shortly after it happened. But now I’m waking up from nightmares and double checking locks. I’m fake. I don’t have a reason to be this upset so many years later.”_  
  
_“People process trauma on their own time. You processing it now is just as valid as it would have been if you were capable of handling it then.”_

 _“That’s not just it, though. When I wake up,”_  
  
_“Just from the nightmares?”_  
  
_“Yeah, just from the nightmares. When I wake up from the nightmares, it’s like I’m not me.”_  
  
_“Who are you?”_  
  
_“Still me. Just not in my body, kinda. I feel like a ghost puppeteering a person.”_

 _“Is it just Micah that makes you feel like yourself again?”_  
  
_“No. Not just him. I come out of it on my own pretty quickly, usually. He just speeds it up.”_

_“Well, then it’s good you have him.”_

“I tried that other make up brand,” Parker says over the phone the next day. “You were right, it looks way better.”  
  
“I told you it would. You should know just to take my word on this by now.”

“So I realized something earlier,” Parker says. “We never had the chance to go on a road trip. Teens in movies are always going on road trips.”  
  
“Parker,” Micah scoffs, and he can practically hear the eyeroll. “Would either of our lazy asses have done it if we had the opportunity?”  
  
“Okay, no, but I still feel cheated out of the chance.” He rolls back in his desk chair and surveys the desk. “What’ve we got now but, like, work and home?”  
  
“PJ, I’m not going into that wasteland and neither are you, so if that’s what you’re thinking,”  
  
“No, no. I just. Feel like there’s something big I gotta do yet.”  
  
“Hey,” Micah jokes, “We could always move out together and realise just how woefully underprepared we are for the Real World, proper noun.”  
  
Parker’s heart jumps through his chest. He’d had that exact thought, only nowhere half as jokingly as Micah presented it. Careful not to let his disappointment at the joking tone slip through, he answers, “I mean, no, but maybe something like that.”  
  
_“I’m moving out,” he tells Dr. Markman._  
  
_“Do you really think you’re prepared to handle that? It sounds like living with your parents is still too isolated and stressful.”_  
  
_“It’s just I think I need control. My whole life, whenever something bad happened to me, I was never the one to save myself.”_

 _“Who saved you when you were sixteen?”_  
  
_Ah, this is always tricky. Strangers tend to get the same barebones story and fill in their own details. He isn’t sure what Dr. Markman thinks she knows. “Davey and his friends, mostly. Micah, too.”_  
  
_“Your older brother. The one that was absent for many years?”_  
  
_“Yeah, him. I tried to save someone and myself once, like really, just once, and was kidnapped and framed. But it’s my brother and Micah who bailed me out. And my brother’s friends, like I said.”_

_“So you want to move out so you don’t feel completely helpless, is that it?”_  
  
_“Ye-eah. I need some kind of control.”_

His parents, despite poorly hidden exchanged glances, let him move forward. They find a tiny shoebox closer to the abandoned warehouse district. It’s of questionable quality, at the very least, but it’s something that, with a little saving, he can reasonably afford. Also, it only has two windows, and both of them lock. He considers sealing them shut, but he doesn’t have air conditioning, and the humid valley summers would kill him slower than any intruder would, so he leaves them open. He keeps the blinds down, though, and checks the deadbolt sixteen times. It seems stable, but he wonders about installing additional locks, somehow. He doesn’t know how much of this is first-apartment jitters and how much is past anxieties haunting him, but it any case, he figures, you can never be too safe.  
  
He manages the first month mostly alone, panic coming in waves he finds manageable if he holds still and breathes through his mouth until he falls into uneasy sleep, but all at once it becomes too overwhelming. His finger hovers over Davey’s contact information, and for a moment he’s too distracted at the idea of trying to shove all three of them (Chainey included, because he never seems too far away) in the minimal space he has that he almost doesn’t call anyone at all, but then he remembers where he is and his heart quickens in his chest and everything is too much, far too much, and he doesn’t mean to call Micah, but he can only really let out a high pitched sort of whine when Micah answers, and there’s a knock on his door twenty minutes later.  
  
“This is kind of disgusting. You live in a cliché, PJ. Hate to be the one to tell you this. There’s, like, exposed pipe in the hallways. Buzzing, flickering lights. I might actually have seen a cockroach. You are officially a real live young adult. Which of your neighbors is the drug dealer?”  
  
Parker barks a wet sort-of laugh that catches in the back of his throat. He clears it and moves to wrap his arms around Micah’s middle. “Thank you for coming,” he mumbles into his neck.  
  
“Yeah, Peej,” Micah says, softer than before. “Of course.” He detaches himself from Parker a few seconds later, immediately turning to his cupboard for glasses. “Nobody’s making you do this, you know. You could go back to your parents and nobody would frown on you.”  
  
“There’s snacks in the cupboard above the sink. No, to the left. Yeah, that one.” Parker leaves awkwardly standing in his own kitchen to sprawl on the floor in the living-slash-bedroom. “I would. Frown on me, I mean. I just gotta do this.”  
  
Micah joins Parker on the floor with a bowl of chips and two glasses of water. “O-okay, Mr. Hero,” he says, “But you don’t have to do it alone.”

 

Parker leaves early for work the next morning, Micah still asleep and only burrowing further into the blankets and otherwise not moving.  It’s eight fifty-five and his shift doesn’t start until ten thirty, but it makes sense enough to try to plod out new paths to work. When he’d searched maps the night before, there looked to be about six different ways to walk to work, all around half an hour or less.

 

This morning path is easy. There are only four notable alleyways, and all of them are wide and empty enough that if he stopped, he’d see straight through them. He gets close enough to work early enough that he stops for breakfast and still arrives on time.

 

“Jones,” his coworker greets when he enters the store, “We got a new guy comin’ in at eleven, if you can just show him what to do.”

 

He smiles slightly, just to show that he was listening, and breathes so quietly nobody hears him sigh. Simple walks probably shouldn’t take so much out of him, but he made it. He made it alive.  
  
The new guy is nice, he guesses, with his shaggy hair and awkward puns, and maybe Parker tries to make himself look a little taller, maybe tries to smile a little brighter and hide the fact that he hasn’t brushed his teeth in two days without being super obvious about it. It’s nice. It’s normal. Micah sends him approximately eight texts about his shitty water pressure, and ten pictures of the six ways he rearranges Parker’s cupboards.

 

_Go home, freeloader_

_Parker pls youd be nothing without my interior design skills_

 

“Hey,” the new guy says, “whatcha giggling at? Girlfriend or something?”

“Nah,” Parker says, slipping his phone back into his pocket and waving at the regular walking in. “Best friend, actually. And I‘m gay, so there’s that.” The new guy struggles for a second, trying to say something neutral, probably, but Parker just grins at a young girl walking in with a boy about sixteen and changes the topic. “Don’t think I caught your name this morning.”  
  
“Oh,” New guy says, “It’s Owen.”

 

Parker’s vision blurs. His stomach sort of lurches. “Oh, yeah?” he says. “That’s awesome. I’m gonna take a bathroom break.” He lurches towards the back of the store where the game room and restrooms are without waiting for a response. His shaking fingers slide the lock after three tries, and he leans his head against the door.  
  
“Jesus, it’s just a name,” he sighs. “Of course there wasn’t just one.” Parker holds his hands up closer to his face to watch them shake. He stands like that until his manager knocks on the door, startling him.  
  
“Hey, Jones, you okay? McFadden said you ditched counter.”

“Yeah,” Parker says, unlocking the door, vision still a little blurry from staring at his hands, “Sorry. Got nauseous.”  
  
“Just make sure you tell someone before you leave the new guy alone, yeah?”

 

“Yeah,” Parker says, “No problem.”

 

The rest of the day passes more or less uneventfully, but with too many people on staff and Parker’s spell, they let him leave early. He calls Micah on his way home.  
  
“Jesus Peej, you just can’t get enough of me.”  
  
“Are you still at my apartment?”

 

“Um, no, I went home. I needed an actual shower. Why?”

 

“Just wondered if I was picking up dinner for two.”  
  
“You need actual groceries.”  
  
“Really?” Parker smiles into the handset. “Thanks, mom. I’ll get on that.”  
  
“Does Susan know the kind of squalor you’re living in? Does she know about the exposed pipes?”  
  
“Yes, Micah, my mother has seen my apartment. How else would I have moved in?”  
  
“I thought Davey might’ve helped.”

 

Parker laughs, then, out loud in the street in a way he hasn’t in a while. “Helping your little brother move doesn’t really stroke your hero’s complex, unfortunately.”

 

“Hey PJ, I gotta go. Did you really just call to see if I left?”

 

Parker’s stomach twists a little bit. “Yeah, no worries. I’m fine.”  
  
_“So my new coworker has the same name.”_  
  
_“The same name as who?”_  
  
_“As the guy that gave me so much grief as a kid.”_

_“How’d that go?”_

_“I panicked at first. I had to go hide. From this guy I was flirting with, like, three minutes prior. Suddenly I couldn’t stand to look him in the eye. Am I just dramatic? When do I get over this?”_  
  
_“Not necessarily dramatic. Not a very useful response, either. How do you plan on handling that in the future?”_

_“Our boss calls us all by our last names. I guess I’ll just keep calling him by his.”_  
  
_“One last thing. Did you tell anyone about it? Your coworkers, your friends?”_  
  
_“No. Well, I called Micah after work. But by then it didn’t really seem like that big of a deal.”_  
  
_“So you were able to calm yourself fairly easily, that’s good. Parker, how’s –"_

_"-_ The new apartment going?” Davey’s voice is tinny from the other end of the line.

 

Parker sighs. “It’s okay. Come over sometime, if you can leave your boyfriend at home.”  
  
“What’ve you got against Chainey?”  
  
“Nothing, I just don’t think I’ve got the space for him to sit down.” He pins his phone to his shoulder and rummages through the fridge. “Gotta be one at a time, bro.”

 

“It’s that small?”  
  
“It’s that small. Me and Micah barely have room to-“  
  
“Micah’s there too?”  
  
“Well, most nights, yeah. He hates it but he stays.”

 

“Are you guys –“  
  
“I am going to be twenty in two weeks. You’re not allowed to threaten any possible boyfriends.” Parker shuts the fridge and straightens, looking around at his other cupboards and trying to gauge what might be in them. “It’s Micah. I’ve known him since before I can remember. Hey, Davey, what’d you need? I have to go to the store and I’m not taking my phone out in the rain.”  
  
“Just to check on you. You’re sure you’re safe?”  
  
Parker rolls his eyes, exasperated. “Between you and Micah, I swear to God. You guys both know Mom’s still alive, right? She calls me every day? I go to her house for dinner on Saturdays? I don’t need four parents.”

 

“You try to be a decent big brother,” Davey grumbles, and Parker can vaguely hear another person sighing somewhere close on the other end.  
  
“Take care. Tell Chainey hi from me.” He clicks his phone off without waiting for a response and moves to pull on his shoes and raincoat before trudging out of the apartment.  
  
The rain is terrible. The streets are deserted, even mostly of cars, and he’d be lying if that didn’t scare him a little bit, but there’s not much he can do about it unless he wants to wait to grab some groceries until after work the next day.  A corner store a block or two over can hold him over for a few days, and in the pouring rain without a car, it’s his best option, even if it means passing streets he’d rather avoid. If he runs, he figures, he can make it.  
  
So he does run, and very nearly makes it without double checking the alleys he passes until movement catches his eye, a bright orange flash writhing around in a trash pile. He slows and steps closer to find a cat, maybe the size of his forarm, emaciated and soaked. Its claws do very little to help it climb between the trash bags to relative safety. It doesn’t notice him, but he reaches out to touch it.

 

“Hey, kitty kitty,” He coos. Sovereign City used to have a hell of a feral cat problem, but they became such an overwhelming pest that most of them were killed by citizens groups. It’d been a while since he’d seen one. “You look pretty young.”

It notices him, then, and startles, almost falling off the pile. Parker checks the alleyway before scooping it up, barely catching its hindquarters enough to hold onto and fold into his coat. “You’re coming with me for a little while,” he says, and moves on before he can regret it.  
  
Marjee at the corner store knows him as something of a sweet and quiet boy. He’s jittery and struggles to make eye contact, sometimes, and buys too many boxes of mac and cheese to be healthy, but he always asks how she’s doing and never causes a fuss, so she likes when he comes in.  
  
Today he’s hiding something in his coat. Marjee can’t quite see what it is, but it’s moving, and he winces, sometimes letting out tiny noises of pain. Usually he’s in and out in two minutes, but today he takes a detour by their pitiful pet food display and grabs three small trays of wet cat food.  
  
“Please don’t bring your pet in again, sir,” Marjee tells him, and she doesn’t think he really catches the semi-joking tone.  
  
“I’m sorry, it won’t happen again,” the boy says, “I just found her out in the cold on my way here.”  
  
Marjee nods and rings him up. He pays, as usual, in exact cash. “You take care of you both, now.”  
  
“Thanks,” he says, “I’ll try.”

 

Back in the apartment, he doesn’t let her out of his coat until he’s got a T-shirt from the floor in hand, towel drying her off as best as he can. “Hey, girl,” he coos. “Sorry about all this. You’re home now.” He keeps the kitten wrapped in the t-shirt close to his body while he struggles one-handed with the pull tab on the salmon cat food container. Her claws don’t resheathe, but her head peaks out curiously. Parker moves to set both the cat and the food on the floor, and with little hesitation, she gulps a few bites down.  
  
_This is gwen,_ a photo text to Micah reads, _shes soft and I love her_

“You got a cat,” Micah says the next day, as soon as he walks in, take-out Chinese in hand. “like, you actually, really, got a cat.”  
  
“I found her in the rain, I couldn’t leave her.”

 

“What’s Gwen from?”  
  
“Spider Gwen.”

 

The cat in question has been hiding under the couch most of the day, coming out mostly to shit on the floor, Parker realizes, because indoor cats need litter boxes and to know what litter boxes are for. He’s never raised a cat before. Currently she’s eyeing Micah warily, her little orange tail flicking out from underneath the couch every few seconds.

 

Micah sighs looking between the two of them. “That was the dorkiest, cutest, most _you_ thing I can imagine, PJ. Congrats. You’ve reached new levels of Parkerness.”  
  
“Cutest?”  
  
“Come eat your chicken.”

 

They’re wrapped in blankets on Parker’s shitty curbside couch attempting to watch a movie when Gwen reappears, attempting to rub up against Micah’s leg. “She’s pretty cuddly for a stray kitten, isn’t she?” He holds his hand down for her to sniff, and she licks off the scent of spicy chicken before something neither human can see spooks her and she dives back under the couch. “Maybe she just needs to be held.”  
  
“Man,” Parker says, not taking his eyes off the screen, “Me too, Gwen.”

 

Micah eyes Parker uneasily, halfway lifting his arm beneath the blanket, but not really enough for the motion to be noticed. He sighs to himself before barely muttering “Parker.”

 

Parker turns to him, then, and Micah lifts his arm completely in what he hopes to be a welcoming kind of gesture. Parker only looks at him, more and more confused as the seconds tick by, so he adds “Come here,” in a voice possibly quieter than before.

 

Parker starts a little, but needs no further prompting to ease his own blanket from off of his shoulders and fall into Micah. It’s a little awkward, he’s pretty sure his forehead nicks Micah’s chin, but its better when Micah’s arm settles around his waist over the blanket. “I’m not gonna squish you, am I?”  
  
“You weigh like ten pounds, PJ.”

He doesn’t really know how to answer that, so he doesn’t, only buries his face into Micah’s collarbone and listens to the movie until he starts getting drowsy. “I don’t think this is entirely platonic on my end, Micah.”

 

“Mine either,” Micah answers. “Are you falling asleep?”  
  
“We should talk about that,” Parker mumbles, “but yeah, kind of.”  
  
“Talk about it in the morning, then. Go to bed now.”

 

Parker grumbles but pushes himself off of Micah. “Were you coming with me?”  
  
“Did you want me to?”

“Shut up, Micah,” Parker snorts, “we’ve been sharing a bed since we were kids. I’m not gonna make you sleep on my couch just because I’m gay.”

 

“Excuse you?” Micah answers, “We’re gay. Don’t cut me out of that.”  
  
“Oh my God, whatever, you brat,” Parker grumbles, “Just come on.”

 

Micah greets him with a kiss when Parker answers the door to his childhood home two weeks later. He isn’t sure when that’s ever going to stop being novel. “Hey, PJ, happy birthday.”  
  
“Is that Micah?” Susan calls from the dining room, “Oh, Micah, hon, come in! I haven’t seen you in months, is your father doing well?”

 

Parker’s slid out of Micah’s arms by the time Susan bustles into the living room, not out of any sort of shame or embarrassment, just that it’s new, and it’s theirs, and neither are sure how ready they are to make it anyone else’s. Its nice to keep a secret that doesn’t feel like the end of the world.  
  
Parker spends his twentieth birthday with his family, for the most part, and for a little bit it feels like he won’t be traumatized forever. Or, if he is, that it won’t always feel impossible.

 

They catch a taxi back to Parker’s apartment later in the evening, and he barely has the door open before Micah’s hands find firm hold on his waist and Micah’s mouth presses ticklish, closed-mouth kisses to the skin behind Parker’s ear. “Hold on,” he giggles, “Hold on a second, I have to call Davey, Micah, just wait,” and with a whine Micah detaches entirely and flops down disappears into the bathroom, likely to sit on his phone until Parker’s done. It’s what passes at privacy in a shoebox.  
  
Nobody answers at the hangar at first, and Parker almost hangs up before someone _hmmmms_ on the other end.  
  
“Hey, Chainey,” Parker says. “It’s me.”  
  
“Parker,” Chainey says, and it’s a lot more than he could have done years ago, but it still falters, “Davey, Davey’s not,”  
  
“Have him call me back, then,” Parker says, “it’s fine. I just wanted to see if I could catch him. We missed him at the party tonight.”  
  
“Party?” Chainey’s quiet for a few seconds, “Happy- happy birthday.”  
  
“Thanks Chainey,” Parker says. Gwen comes meowing out from beneath the couch, making a beeline toward Parker. “Oh, did I tell you I got a cat? Got her out of some trash a few weeks ago, she’s really sweet. You guys gotta come meet her.”

“Okay.”

 

“You know,” Parker says, “I wasn’t ever really sure I’d get here. And now that I am here I feel like I’m doing it wrong. Davey handled dying better than I handle being alive.”  
  
“Parker,” Chainey’s tone sounds… sad, sort of, not quite like pity, but somewhat understanding.

  
“Shit, sorry,” Parker says, “Shouldn’t make you talk. I’ll see you this weekend?” Chainey’s pretty proficient at sign language. Parker’s not, but Davey’s never too far away to bridge the gap.  
  
“Yeah.”

 

“See you later,” Parker says into the handset, and then louder to the apartment, “I’m done, if that’s what you were waiting for.” The bathroom door opens and Micah shuffles out.  
  
“Your brother?”  
  
“His boyfriend.”

 

“Wow,” Micah scoffs, “Couldn’t even answer on his own brother’s birthday. What better could a dead guy have to do?”  
  
“I don’t know, he might be with Sam or something,” Parker says, leaning down to scratch behind Gwen’s ears. “When I get a bigger apartment, I’m getting a dog.”  
  
“Wow, pretty confident in our ability to be a successful pet owner, huh? Didn’t you only drag that out of the trash less than a month ago?”  
  
“Yeah, but she already lets me hold her.” As if to prove his point, Parker scoops the cat up into his arms and nuzzles into her fur. “Don’t you, Gwen? Good girl.” To his credit, she only makes a halfhearted attempt at escaping.

 

‘Okay, show off, let’s watch a movie.”

 

He hadn’t necessarily meant to get sappy on Chainey, but the more Parker overthinks it, the more he realizes he’s probably right. Today he took the same route to work he did yesterday, walking past alleys at normal speeds, and he’d only woken up from nightmares twice the last week. Traumatized, sure, but surviving.  
  
“Parker,” Micah says, “What’re we watching?”

 

Gwen wiggles out of Parker’s arms to sit on the other side of Micah, so Parker sighs and plops into his shoulder. “Whatever you want. I doubt I’ll really pay attention.”  
  
“You okay?”  
  
Parker hums. “Yeah,” he says, “Probably.”

**Author's Note:**

> the cat is ironic but also i just really?? feel like he'd need to feel responsible for something, but i also dont think he could handle a dog.


End file.
